privatehudson
The Ultimate Badass
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2003
- Messages
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An equally important question is whether the War Cabinet could stop Japan from negotiating a settlement.
Given the level of power enjoyed by the military and the War Cabinet I would say that they probably could. It took the Emperor himself to get them all to agree to a surrender after two atom bombs and months of firebombings and other raids, I doubt they would roll over and accept a negotiated peace without them. Much would rely on his stance I imagine but since he didn't seem to accept the futility of continuing the war until mid to late June I doubt he would have felt strong enough had the home islands not been suffering so badly.
One of the great problemsof the Japanese government at the time is that it was what Herbert Bix termed "a system of collective irresponsibility", nobody was accountable for anything, and so everyone did what they could get away with. The possibility that a relatively small (the Toseiha now being the dominant faction) military clique could and would have launched a military coup to forgo negotiations is of course impossible to answer, however it is one that is largely irrelevant. The fact that a coup could potentially happen is no reason for not dealing with a government, in fact if that was true, diplomacy as we know it wouldn't exist.
The Army didn't need to launch a coup to forestall peace negotiations, the War Council could legally prevent Japan entering a peace agreement unless the War Council unanimously agreed to it. The Army also held what amounted to a veto since the Council couldn't exist without an Army representative. If they had felt that negotiations may have lead to something akin to the 4 points programme then they may well have not opposed such moves. Otherwise, without a demonstration of how Japan could be systematically destroyed it's hard to see them agreeing.
That rather misses the point though since the Allies didn't worry much about the possibility of a coup preventing negotiations. The Allies made it abundantly clear that they wanted unconditional surrender, the feelers put out by Japan talked about negotiating one. The official line from Tokyo was enough to put the allies off, the possibility of a coup was more a problem for the Emperor and men like Sato.
I stopped reading there, because this is simply untrue.
Agreed, some factions in Japan were willing to try and negotiate a peace. Its just that the peace they wanted to negotiate wasn't acceptable to the Allies and was frequently based on rather naive assumptions.